Alumni Spotlight: Jenny McCoy

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SNL alumna Jenny McCoy is a pastry chef, cookbook author, instructor and consultant. (Photo by Tom Vangel)Pastry chef Jenny McCoy’s (SNL ’07) list of past employers reads like a veritable who’s who in the restaurant world. There’s Blackbird, Charlie Trotter’s and Gordon in Chicago, all three of Emeril Lagasse’s New Orleans
restaurants, and Marc Forgione, A Voce and Craft in New York City. With disarming modesty, however, McCoy claims she regularly burned Pillsbury slice-and-bake cookies growing up.

McCoy’s busy career as a pastry chef, instructor, cook
book author and consultant began on a whim. “I had no
previous inclination to be a chef, but I didn’t want to go
to a regular college right after high school,” she recalls.
Inspired by an aunt’s catering business, she enrolled in the
culinary program at Chicago’s Kendall College and fell in
love with baking. “I think I was drawn to the visuals of
it,” she says. “Also, I was strong, resilient and young, so I
could handle the crazy hours and 110-degree kitchens!”

Armed with focus and determination, McCoy landed
a job at Gordon by cold-calling the pastry chef. She
employed a similar strategy to secure her next position at
Blackbird, and from there, she continued to rise in the fine
dining industry. “I worked 18 hours during my audition
for Charlie Trotter’s,” she remembers. By her early 20s,
McCoy was working 80 hours per week. She loved the
intensity of the kitchen, but she felt an urge to try
other things, which led her to enrolling at DePaul.

The School for New Learning offered McCoy an
opportunity to further refine her interests, which
at that time included Spanish education. “I did a
lot of reflective writing exercises at SNL, and they
were all about food,” McCoy remembers. “My
advisor said, ‘Are you sure Spanish education
is what you want to do?’” With that gentle
prodding, McCoy finally accepted that she wasn’t
ready to say goodbye to the food world.

McCoy’s food writing degree focused on
creative, critical, technical and recipe writing.
“I hated writing so much, and I’m not good at it,
so that’s why I decided to run straight at it,” McCoy
laughs. “That’s always how I’ve been.” Partway through
the program, McCoy accepted an offer to run Emeril’s
pastry kitchens, so she finished her degree online. In
New Orleans, she continued to hone her writing skills by
blogging regularly for Emeril’s website, and a few years
later, McCoy successfully pitched a seasonal desserts
cookbook to a publisher.

“That was my proudest moment,” McCoy says. “I’d
been thinking about a cookbook for 14 years, and I got
to put my degree to good use.” The book, titled “Jenny
McCoy’s Desserts for Every Season,” showcases her baking
philosophy: keep it simple and don’t overthink it. “I don’t
care if you bake from a box—just make something,”
she says. These days, McCoy inspires both recreational
and professional bakers through her pastry classes at the
Institute of Culinary Education in New York City, where
she currently lives, as well as online through Craftsy. Plus,
McCoy has another cookbook
in the works. “Even when I
was baking 12 hours a day
in a restaurant, I could
still come home and
start baking something
else,” she says. “I never
grow tired of it!”

This article was republished from DePaul Magazine's 14 Under 40 feature. Click here to visit the magazine's website.

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Extra, Extra!

Learn how to make one of McCoy's favorite desserts: chocolate-dried cherry bread pudding.